Following
by scuttlesworth
Summary: Sherlock spends a small bit of a day without a crime by following Watson to the store. Introspection happens. Rated T because introspection is not terribly cheerful.


It's all about the attention. Well. Partly about the attention. Sometimes it's about being lazy, purely. And sometimes it's about being so focused on something that he can't think enough to even move. Sometimes he's not convinced that he's been breathing properly, when he really focuses. But occasionally it is, really, about the attention. He waits until the door closes, lying on his back on the sofa with the pillow over his eyes and his feet dangling loosely in the air. Looking for all the world like the picture of inactivity. The violin and bow are clutched against his chest. Watson has just agreed to go to the store.

It's amazing how easy it is to see into other people's minds and lives, and how difficult it is to do anything about your own. Compulsions, he thinks. He has compulsions. Although calling his own behaviours compulsions and other people's behaviors crude deterministic dumb-shows could be a prime personal example of the fundamental attribution error, which he has trained himself not to perform. Much. The door latch clicks shut. Feet on the stairs. Watson hasn't forgotten anything this time and won't be back. Seventeen steps down. Front door.

Doctor John Watson, at least, is not a puppet in a crude deterministic dumb-show. He brings a bulldogged stubbornness to his every action which elevates him nearly to a state of true self-awareness. Behind that simple face with the dumb look is a determined, competent mind with a tremendous capacity for appreciating normalcy in the midst of chaos. He's a bit broken, though; his ability to appreciate normalcy in the midst of normalcy has gone straight to hell, over the years. It's the training. Set someone on the pivotal life and death edge long enough and any other situation becomes impossible for them to understand. How can the average person *care* about all the little bits of trivia they care about on a daily basis? How can these things be precious when they're so common? Make peace uncommon though; make life a razor's edge thing, and every moment becomes infused with grace and meaning. It's addictive. John manages it quite well. Give him stress like water and he thrives. Give him peace and he crumbles, like a dry hillside under the sun. Sherlock springs up from the couch, violin and bow set silently down in the spot he's just vacated. Coat inside out. Ugly scarf from under the sofa. Grey hat.

Sherlock isn't made of the same stuff. He never needed to adapt to the stress. It was there, living inside him, from day one. From his first memories he can recall worry, a sort of constant thing living under his breastbone, behind his eyes. He needed to pick everything apart, all the time. Needed to understand it all completely so he would never be caught unprepared. Life is uncertain, chancy stuff, and it needs to be examined. Pinned, dissected, and known to the last detail before it can be rendered safe. Out the door, up the stairs instead of down, and along behind the row of flats. This is the chancy part, where he could conceivably loose his quarry. But down the fire ladder and there, across the street. Sandy hair, big ears, little man with a jaunty military walk. Slipping aside through the crowd, opposite side of the street. Slightly ahead of your quarry, watching him in glass reflections, barely paying enough attention to the crowd to avoid all the other sheep on their way to the movies or the bar or home for the kettle and telly.

In the shop. Tea bags. Instant coffee. Biscuits. Carrots. Apples. John looks at some instant curries and grimaces. Damned healthy man.

John is known. Almost completely. And not entirely boring even when completely comprehended, which is rare and valuable. But safe, yes, of course. Quite safe. Very much so. Which does not negate the obsession one bit; slipping behind him in the crowd at the market, watching him chat up the young woman behind the counter. She's a bit young for him and has a boyfriend. Also possibly an STD, so Sherlock is infinitely grateful when John moves away and leaves her behind without exchanging anything more than money. On the way home again.

Down the street, watching John, watching everything around him, watching the cars. None of them slide up and beckon him inside. Nobody shoots at him. Sherlock nods to the guitarist on the corner with the blanket, and slips ahead to get back into the apartment. Must be home first. Mustn't look like you've been following him again. Mustn't be paranoid. If it were anyone but John you'd be paranoid they would betray you; because it's him, you've exchanged that for being paranoid that someone will take him and use him against you. Or worse. But by following him you betray him yourself, betray the fact of his importance. Which possibly was given up by the fact that he's living in the same flat as you. Which is completely unnecessary. Financially speaking. Something he must never ever ever know.

Sherlock can, whenever he pleases, make any amount of money he needs. He mostly can't be bothered. It's boring, really. Money is a thing that's necessary, like food, and one he lacks interest in quite as much as he lacks interest in food. It's a fuel to be burnt. What he needs, what he values, is company. An audience. Someone to react, some living thing which won't hurt him which speaks and breathes and reminds him to eat sometimes and doesn't let him get too far away from whatever passes for reality. He needs an anchor, a tether. That's something no great wad of cash could ever buy. So off come the jacket, away goes the hat and scarf, he settles down on the barely-cool sofa and snatches up the violin and bow and begins a frenetic wailing dirge, something suitably awful that John will immediately ask him to cease and desist when he walks in the door, and waits.

And waits. And waits. The dirge has become a breakneck screeching thing full of crashing chords and dying cats when John finally comes in, plastic bag over one arm and hands over his ears, line between his brows as he glances up at Sherlock. Sherlock cannot help it; he lowers the violin and bow abruptly and glares accusing eyes at John. "Late," he says sharply. Anger covers the relief he feels from terror. What if this is when John leaves him? What if this is when he's had too much?

John pinches his lips together and aims himself for the kitchen. There are noises: fridge, John's mutter of disgust, things being put away. "Someone got their pocket picked right in front of me," he calls back through the door. Sherlock will confirm with the street corner guitarist later. What with the occasional media storm over their cases, the more than occasional criminal trying to keep tabs on them, Mycroft's surveillance on them both and his personal watch over John, the good little Doctor was one of the most-watched non-celebrities in the country. Something he had surely not signed up for, when he chose to move into the flat. "Bring me some of the Hob Nobs you bought," Sherlock calls dismissively. "And some tea, while you're making some." John might make a noise of protest, there, but the violin begins again. When the tea comes Sherlock will let it get cold and he'll take one bite from the biscuit before he leaves it for the mice to nibble. It's not about the tea or the sweet.

It's about John, his friend? Companion? Flat-mate? Associate? John with that frustrated look on his face but bringing the asked-for thing anyways. It's unreasonable. He knows it. Knows it's a compulsion.

It's one he can't seem to break.

John keeps it from getting too bad. Draws lines in the sand, lines across their ratty carpet. Refuses to be used completely, refuses to be an utter doormat. And Sherlock, scowling and storming off, feels a tremendous sense of relief whenever this happens. Whenever John takes him to task, says no, sets something firmly in stone. It's not often, but when it happens it's as though the world assumes order from madness. As though not everything is pointless and awful. As though, for just a moment, he's wandered into some human habitation in an alien zoo, and found it comforting for a bit until restless feet send him back out into the unknown.

Movement is life and stagnation is death and someday Sherlock will figure it out, how John can stay still and sit there and read a paper without just rotting in place like an old satsuma left in a pocket for too many days after Christmas. It must be in the brain. In the ordinary brain. How else, then, can John manage that which Sherlock never, ever could?

He needs a case, desperately. The line that keeps him here in this flat, ignoring perfectly good tea and drawing demons from his violin is so very, very thin sometimes. He needs a distraction from the things that eat him alive, the desperation he sometimes gets when he considers what he's doing. What he's not doing. What the point of it all is.

Mycroft finds it all in Queen and Country. In the greater good, in the Service to the Nation, to a thing he feels is larger than himself. And Mycroft, bless him, can walk past a hundred million drunken puking cursing honking spitting swearing red-faced yobs every day and still feel that the notion of country is somehow greater than any one individual, than any one problem. He finds his distraction in the swift interplay of countries, in the rivers of politics and precision and diplomacy. He loves the well-timed word with another like himself, playing a subtle game on a board made from maps. Mycroft preaches this with fervor and passion, with the whole-hearted devotion of the man who has been saved and wishes nothing more than to share the lifeboat with… with whom? Kin? Loved ones? Family? Or merely someone else he knows can row the thing? His loving brother can never seem to understand what Sherlock gets form the individual cases, why he looks at the bark of the trees and doesn't map the forest instead.

The forest is made from the trees. Nations are made from people. Crimes are each individual, personal, and small. Nations - men in their whole, en masse - become mere statistics, groups moving this way and that with the predictability of birds in flight: south in winter, north in summer. Groups are dull. But the individual under stress, the small crime, may move in any direction at any time, like a drop of water on a griddle. The smaller crimes are random, scattered, and - sometimes - a real puzzle in ways that the dance of nations can never, ever be.

Sometimes Sherlock thinks about what he might do, if he solved every crime there was. If a perfect society came to be, where no-one could ever get away with anything. It's what he works towards, indirectly, after all. It's his goal - hunt the anomalies down and eliminate them.

He thinks that if the world ever became that shining place it would have no room eft for him in it, and he'd just blow his own brains out. He wonders what John would do, in a world like that. John who is sitting there with a steaming cuppa and a perfectly content look on his face, reading. Somewhere far away in his head. John ignoring him while he broods.

He looks away. Draws the bow sharply down the violin, hard enough to send bits of white horsehair drifting through the air. He'll need a new bow soon with how he's abusing this one. John is glaring at him. He has John's attention. His audience, his steady right hand, and the noises change to notes and John relaxes, and Sherlock knows without hearing anything over the reverberation of the violin near his ear that John is putting down the book and leaning back and listening. Listening to the music that comes from Sherlock's violin, from his hands, from his mind. Sherlock feels calm and control return. There's an edge to the music, of course. This isn't a dreamy day of contemplation. But it's music and not screams, and that's something. Sometimes he can't stand to play music at all, or have any noise. Sometimes he desperately needs the quiet, either to let the sound of his mind echo or to ensure he can listen for the sounds of the world around him.

Sounds can be threats.

The lights in the window dim and the city lights flicker, manmade beats not half as steady as those of the sun. The earth goes around the sun, he thinks, and wonders why that little tidbit won't go away. What possible use could he have for it? He needs to know about seasonal day length and shadow alterations based on latitude and triangulation via celestial objects, but the actual placement of said celestial objects with regards to each other or the Earth is utterly, completely useless. Still he can't seem to eliminate it. It's stuck there right between John's jam on toast and the fact that Lestrade has a weakness for that terrible fake hazelnut creamer in his coffee.

The music changes with the coming evening, becomes brooding, melancholy. Sherlock slowly leans back, lets his eyes slip closed. Sees the light change in the room anyways on the back of his eyelids, a simulation of the room called up as perfectly and clearly real as the room itself. Everything in its place. John in his place. He steps outside the room in his mind, goes downstairs. Mrs. Hudson sitting in her chair, telly muted while she listens to the music upstairs. All is well. He walks out into the street and watches the cars pass through his body while their faint honking comes to his ears in the room above. Looks up at the open window, at how the light touches it, and how the curtains move in the evening breeze, and the music changes and becomes something like water drifting past in the Thames, dark and bitter and slow and still passing too swiftly, the light fading too fast. The darkness coming too soon.

Darkness always comes too soon. In the room, Sherlock's bow slows to a stop and his eyes open sightless onto the room. John is asleep. A bit of drool is leaking from the corner of his mouth onto his jumper. There's a moment of calm and silence on their street, when no cars pass, and the soft shuffle as Mrs. Hudson moves around downstairs, getting ready for bed. It's all so clear and still, this moment like crystal, and he does what he would never admit: he stores it away, every detail a snapshot, and stacks it in the archives of his mind on top of a slim stack of other photos. His mind that contains nothing he does not need, his perfect empty palace, and this, his great secret: in this one corner not everything in his mind is focused solely on work.

Sometimes when it gets too dark, he pulls out the images in this stack. Each is as well-known to him as the local criminal database, every detail memorized and scrutinized over and over. But these memories are, each and every one, of things that bear no relation to crime; no relation to work, or puzzles. Each image is a thing that would be instantly recognizable to any photographer as common - even banal. Worthless on the market. There's a dog looking up at him, the expensive rug beneath its fluffy tail and the bits of a well-chewed purse lying about. There's the cricket pitch and a bunch of awkward eleven and twelve year olds somehow made graceful by the bright green grass and the white uniforms, about to run from a sudden downpour. There's a chip shop and his brother, suited up and young and plump, standing in line looking for all the world like an ordinary businessman instead of a lethal manipulator. There are more, but now there's this: the darkness, the tiny slice of red sunset over the rooftops out the window, the streetlights below, the clutter of 221B Baker St, John sleeping and drooling, Mrs. Hudson downstairs.

Sometimes he wonders about time, if these events are still occurring somewhere in the past while all that is to come occurs in the future, with no distinction between them except their location in a mathematical contract he's never bothered to examine. He hopes so. He hopes that these perfect memories aren't gone forever, lost like sand-art blown by the desert wind. He hopes they're contained somehow in more than his mind. But he does not ever truly believe it.

Like a shadow he rises, lies his bow and instrument down on the dent his bony arse has left in the cushion - it's a remarkably well suited hollow - and slips away down the hall, to his room.

Time to let John sleep. He'll begin again in the morning.


End file.
